SBIR Phase II: Using microbial genetic data to improve oil production efficiency and reduce environmental impact

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是提高国内石油生产的效率。使用目前的方法，石油工业只能从页岩地层中提取5%的已知烃。这意味着超过5000亿美元的潜在石油和天然气不能为美国经济经济生产。其目的是通过提供新的地下信息来提高石油生产的效率，以改善运营决策。由此产生的生产商价值增加可高达每口井100万美元。此外，还可以显著降低水力压裂工艺对环境的影响，目前水力压裂工艺的效率仅为50%。通过为行业提供新的地下数据，这些信息可以通过节省高达450亿加仑的淡水和100万辆铁路汽车的开采沙子来减少对环境的影响。此外，地下微生物组的分析是新学术知识的丰富领域。 超过80%的第一阶段鉴定的微生物菌株从未在公共参考文献中记录。这项工作不仅提供了经济和社会价值，还扩展了科学知识。SBIR第二阶段项目提出使用下一代微生物组分析来提高国内石油生产效率。研究目标是分析地下碳氢化合物微生物组，以表征碳氢化合物储层，并利用这一新的数据源来提高电流效率。目标是分析美国西南部的50口生产威尔斯井，并开发将微生物概况与关键储层特性联系起来的统计模型，以提高生产效率。所采用的分析方法将利用来自科罗拉多大学的2000多万美元政府资金的技术，用于创建称为“QIIME”的生物信息学软件。“QIIME技术在分析和模拟人体微生物组方面已经进行了广泛的测试，但在第一阶段工作之前从未应用于地下碳氢化合物微生物组。 通过结合云计算、DNA测序和新型软件分析的进步，该项目将证明这些微生物群落与石油和天然气行业有意义的生产参数相关。在这样做的过程中，该项目将在试点规模上证明，这种新的信息源可以作为一种新型的、非侵入性的、低成本的储层表征工具，使该行业能够最大限度地提高油气产量，同时最大限度地减少对环境的影响。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will be to increase the efficiency of domestic oil production. Using current methods, the oil industry is able to extract only 5% of the known hydrocarbon from shale formation. This represents more than $500B of potential oil and gas that cannot be economically produced for the US economy. The aim is to increase the efficiency of oil production by providing novel subsurface information to improve operational decision making. The resulting value increase for a producer can be up to $1M per well. In addition, it is possible to significantly reduce the environmental impact of the hydraulic fracturing process, which is currently only 50% efficient. By providing novel subsurface data for the industry, this information can reduce environmental impact by saving up to 45B gallons of fresh water and 1M rail cars of mined sand. Furthermore, the analysis of subsurface microbiomes is a rich area for new academic knowledge. Over 80% of the microbial strains identified in Phase I have never been documented in public references. This work not only provides economic and social value, but also expands scientific knowledge.This SBIR Phase II project proposes to use next-generation microbiome analyses to increase the efficiency of domestic oil production. The research objective is to analyze the subsurface hydrocarbon microbiome to characterize hydrocarbon reservoirs and leverage this new data source to increase current efficiency rates. The goal is to analyze 50 producing wells in the Southwestern US, and develop statistical models linking microbial profiles to key reservoir properties that can increase production efficiencies. The analytical method employed will utilize technology stemming from over $20 million in government funding to the University of Colorado used to create bioinformatics software known as "QIIME." The QIIME technology has been extensively tested in analyzing and modeling the human microbiome, but has never been applied to the subsurface hydrocarbon microbiome prior to the Phase I work. By combining advances in cloud computing, DNA sequencing, and novel software analytics, this project will demonstrate that these microbial communities correlate to meaningful production parameters for the oil and gas industry. In so doing, the project will demonstrate at pilot scale that this new information source can be utilized as a novel, non-invasive, low-cost reservoir characterization tool that allows the industry to maximize hydrocarbon production while minimizing environmental impact.